Montreal police say Stéfanie Trudeau isn’t the only bad apple

Sue Montgomery, GAZETTE justice reporter10.11.2012

Constable Stéfanie Trudeau in an incident in the spring of 2012 in which a man was pepper sprayed. The officer — also known by her badge number 728 — drew attention when this video surfaced of her generously pepper-spraying student protesters who appeared to pose no physical threat.YouTube

Montreal police chief Marc Parent speaks to media at police headquarters on Thursday. He called Stéfanie Trudeau, an officer who was caught on video choking a man earlier this month, a danger to the public.John Kenney
/ montreal gazette

About 200 protesters took to the streets of Montreal’s downtown core Friday night to decry police violence and demand the firing of the officer ...

MONTREAL - Her language was atrocious, her behaviour shocking and unbecoming of a police officer.

By now, most people — including students at Quebec’s national police academy — have viewed the footage that captured Montreal Police Constable Stéfanie Trudeau treating citizens in a way her boss described as intolerable and unacceptable.

She is, said police chief Marc Parent, a danger to the public.

Doesn’t exactly instill confidence. But what perhaps is more worrisome is that some in the force say Trudeau is not unique.

“If people really knew how the police operate, they’d be shocked,” said one veteran Montreal police officer. “It’s a disaster.

“In the past 15 years, there’s been a real lack of discipline.”

The officer, who asked that his name not be published, said that if something similar had happened “in the old days,” Trudeau’s sergeant would have hauled her into the office and asked her “what the hell happened out there?”

Instead, he said, the whole incident was kept under wraps and there was no move to reprimand the officer until this week, when cellphone video of the Oct. 2 incident was aired on Radio-Canada and the brass was forced to suspend Trudeau and launch an internal investigation.

Montreal Police spokesman Ian Lafrenière wouldn’t comment on the officer’s claims, saying that if the investigation concludes that something should have been done, the force will take steps to change things.

The video showed Trudeau choking a man in a stairwell and using disrespectful language when relaying details of the scene to her supervisor.

The incident began when Trudeau asked a man holding an open beer on the street for identification. Things escalated and in the end, 20 police vehicles arrived on the scene — an indication, said the veteran, of just how out of control things have become.

He said young recruits are so jittery, they don’t walk the beat so don’t get to know the neighbourhoods or people. Some, he said, won’t even go into the métro alone, despite being armed with a gun and pepper spray.

“They go out on a call, go straight back to their station, roll up the windows and shut the door,” he said, adding that it was just by chance that the Dawson College shooting wasn’t a massacre. “The mindset is just not there at all and we’ve just been very lucky in the past few years (that worse things haven’t happened).”

He pointed to two main problems: the lack of military-style training with a focus on discipline, and incompetent supervisors unwilling to make decisions for fear of jeopardizing a possible promotion to top brass.

After complaints from Quebec police forces that young recruits weren’t up to snuff, even after 15 weeks at Quebec’s police academy and three years of mandatory college-level police technology courses, the École nationale de police in Nicolet three years ago introduced psychological testing.

No one, said Pierre Saint-Antoine, a spokesman for the academy, has been rejected from the academy based on the outcome of those tests, but it could affect their standing in their class and will be given to the police force that is interested in hiring them.

One two-hour “situational judgment” test, consists of 40 scenarios and courses of action to test students’ reaction under stress. Another test, known as M-Pulse, is meant to detect anyone who has the potential for unprofessional conduct, such as bullying, sexism or racism.

“The challenge is to detect behaviour that is troublesome,” Saint-Antoine said. “The system isn’t perfect and can’t detect everything.”

The old-school cops pooh-pooh such testing, and say it’s time to get away from the “touchy feely” social work approach and return to the days when you had to control your emotions and react quickly, because the longer it takes to intervene, the more things will escalate.

A lawyer that appeared before the coroner’s inquiry into the 2008 police shooting death of Fredy Villanueva said he’s also heard tales of lax police training and said he wasn’t at all surprised by the Trudeau video footage.

“This video is just proof of something that has been going on for a long time,” said Alain Arsenault, who represented shooting victim Jeffrey Sagor-Metellus at the inquiry.

In the Villanueva case, Arsenault pointed out, Constables Jean-Loup Lapointe and Stéphanie Pilotte also intervened for a minor municipal infraction — a group of unarmed teens playing dice in a parking lot. Things escalated quickly and Lapointe fatally shot Villanueva and injured two others.

Arsneault, like the veteran officer, believes that there has to be a civilian body overseeing the police, as exists in Ontario.

“Because when they know they’ll be investigated, they’ll be more careful,” said Arsenault, who is also representing three students injured by police during last spring’s student demonstrations. “It’s as simple as that, because right now, there is no control.”

It was during those months of protests against proposed tuition hikes that Trudeau, also known by her badge number 728, first popped up in the spotlight via YouTube when a video of her pepper spraying students during a demonstration garnered more than half a million views.

She was also suspended for six days in November, 2001 for showing an aggressive attitude toward staff at Sainte-Justine Hospital. A 1998 complaint against her before the Police Ethics Committee for making racist remarks to a black woman was rejected in 2000.

Another complaint before the committee for using abusive language against a woman in 2002 was dismissed in 2004 after the alleged victim decided not to return to Canada for the procedure and chose to drop it.

Arsenault called the administrative tribunal a waste of time and suggested a commission of inquiry to investigate the Montreal police, similar to the Poitras Commission in the 1990s, that looked into wrongdoing by the Sûreté du Québec.

But at the end of the day, it’s the police force that has a responsibility to embrace new recruits and supervise them closely because “they are training future managers and supervisors,” St. Antoine said.

“They have to be models and react quickly when things like this happen.”

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